Charles Payne – Bio, Wife-Yvonne Payne, Net Worth, Affair, Suspension

Charles Payne is a prominent and successful television anchor, business journalist, host of FOX network’s Making Money, and contributor on the FOX Business Network (FBN). He also frequently appears on the FOX News Channel shows Your World with Neil Cavuto and Bulls and Bears. He joined the Fox network at its launch and wrote and published his first book in the same year. He is also the chief executive officer of Wall Street Strategies. In 2017, he was suspended by the network after he was accused of rape. Read on for more details about his life.

Charles Payne – Biography

Charles Payne was born in New York on the 15th of November, 1960. Not much info is available about his family and background growing up. At the age of 17, he enlisted in the United States Air Force and served as a security policeman at the Minot Air Force Base in Minot, North Dakota. While still in service, he attended the Central Texas College and subsequently the Minot State University.

Payne’s career on Wallstreet kicked off sometime in 1985 at E.F. Hutton, a stock brokerage firm where he worked as an analyst. In 1991, he went on to found the Wall Street Strategies which is an independent stock market research firm. As the CEO and principal analyst of the firm, Payne released his first book in 2007 titled Be Smart, Act Fast, Get Rich: Your Game Plan For Getting It Right In The Stock Market.

Wife – Yvonne Payne

Charles Payne’s wife Yvonne Payne is an American writer and author of the novel, Kritsotopoula: Girl of Kritsa. Not much is known about her background and personal life, but it is known that she met and began dating Charles in the early 2000s and by March of 2004, the couple was married. They have two children, a boy and girl and the family resides in Teaneck, New Jersey.

When Yvonne was younger, she suffered from ventricular tachycardia, a condition whereby the heart beats at a faster-than-average rate. In 2012 however, she underwent a successful surgery for a heart transplant. The heart was donated by the family of child actress Sammi Kane Kraft, who had died in a car accident.

Affair and Suspension

Payne with Scottie Nell Hughes

Payne is no stranger to scandal. Before his 2017 rape allegation, there was a 1999 controversy in which he paid a civil penalty of $25,000 for failure to disclose that he received payments from members of the Wall Street Strategies to promote members’ stock. These share prices later turned out to be worthless.

Fast forward to June 2017 and Charles Payne is in yet another scandal when he was accused of sexual harassment and rape by a former girlfriend and network colleague, Scottie Nell Hughes. Although Payne vehemently denied the accusation of rape, he did admit that he and miss Hughes had carried on a three-year affair which ended in 2015.

After bringing forth her claims to the network, Charles Payne was suspended pending an investigation into the matter. The suspension was however lifted in less than two months after the network had completed its investigation and did not find fault with Payne.

Miss Hughes on her part did not meet with a favorable outcome after she moved to file a lawsuit against the network. In the lawsuit, she claimed that the network had blacklisted her and shortened her screen time after she reported Payne to them. In the same lawsuit, miss Hughes stated that in 2013, Payne had pressured his way into her hotel room and coerced her into having sexual intercourse with him even though she had repeatedly told him to stop.

She claimed that the assault did not end there as she was forced into a sexual relationship with Payne over the next two years. She also claimed that while the affair carried on, she was given increased screen time on Fox News and Fox Business in addition to Payne’s promise of a contributor contract. The latter, however, wasn’t fulfilled.

Since the revelation of the affair and alleged sexual harassment claim, miss Hughes has gotten more than she bargained for. She has been accused of crying wolf because Payne did not totally complete his end of their arrangement, by not securing her a contributor contract. In addition to a sudden decline in bookings across cable news networks, she was also taken out of consideration for positions in the Trump administration, for which she had been a strong vocal advocate.

Charles Payne’s Net Worth

Charles Payne has accumulated a net worth of 10 million dollars. His wage package as a contributor to the Fox News Channel is an estimated $60,330. He also rakes in a considerably tidy salary working as a contributor to the Fox Business Network.